Linux

I get what you're saying..if that were my experience I'd be jack of it too. I've got similar spec and am running Nobara which is pretty much Steam OS for people with Nvidia cards. The only thing. The only thing I got really into the weeds on was setting up Plex. Which wasn't my first preference but I couldn't work out how to get Jellyfin to cast to my old Chromecast. Other than that though I've had a great experience that 'just works'.

If it makes you feel any better, I say the same thing about windows when I'm forced to use it.

It isn't just a different operating system, it's also a different workflow and set of habits.

Stick with it, it will reward you.

Surface Go 1: Had problems with my bluetooth mouse being slow to be detected. Also sometime it’s slow until I connect and disconnect the screen it’s hooked up to. Otherwise works flawlessly.

MacBook Pro 2012: Sometimes I have to reinstall some drivers for the wifi. Otherwise works flawlessly.

Both run Fedora 42. So I’d advise you to not give up and maybe just switch distro👍

I've never had a flawless experience with any computer, regardless of manufacturer, architecture, or OS. They all have different quirks. Over time, you get used to the quirks of the OS you're using, and so switching to a different OS feels weird.

Some distros are more fragile than others. Stuff like not having the Nvidia drivers installed by default (I'm assuming for the llvmpipe issue) are sometimes discussed in installation guides. IDK if Ubuntu has one since I don't use it.

Blink-based browsers (like Vivaldi, Chromium, etc.) IMO kind of suck on Linux (or at least Wayland). It's probably worse with Nvidia cards since Nvidia is still sometimes flaky on Wayland.

The LibreWolf issue is maybe not an issue at all. I'm assuming you mean RAM, and if so, browsers just like to eat as much memory as they're allowed to eat. If you open up something else and it needs the memory, LibreWolf will likely let go of some of it. There are probably some knobs you can dial in LibreWolf (or Linux kernel settings) if it's really an issue for some reason.

I only really have issues when I'm trying to set something up that's not already configured by the distro (or if I'm doing something particularly weird).

Every OS sucks. Linux sucks wayyy less tho

I'm on AMD, but I do still run into frequent issues. Normally with Ubuntu variations most things just work but not everything.

Linux is created mostly by unpaid volunteers, so it's gonna have it's faults. For so many reasons I'm inclined not to use Windows so finding that a feature doesn't work isn't a big deal for me.

I felt exactly the same thing before actually trying mint. It’s the only distro that just works for me. A true daily driver.

I’ve been running Linux for two years but I do find it’s not as easy to use as Windows still, but it’s not worlds apart like it once was. However I didn’t have the experience you had, mine was pretty smooth. I spent some time working quirks out but nothing was breaking, it was just tweak isn’t it to the way I want it. Maybe try hopping to a different distro if you’re having bad luck with that one. I was on Fedora and it’s pretty solid now.

Kind of out of my depth here, but what machine are you running it on?

I run Kubuntu and it isn't that bad, but it's definitely less reliable than Windows. Often KDE seems to completely crash, requiring a force restart of my system. I also have a bunch of monitors that turn off via a smart plug when I leave the house, and it sometimes doesn't like that.

Try latest stable Debian (13 Trixie) with Chromium or Firefox - I have no issues personally, though I'm not dealing with an Nvidia graphics card thankfully

The best thing I ever did was use Nvidia prime offloading to move everything to my integrated GPU and have only select GPU intensive applications (like games, video editing) interact with Nvidia.

Never had to deal with weird graphics bugs after that.

The issue is you installed Ubuntu with an RTX 3060 and you intend to game, heh.

You need a distro optimized for gaming on Nvidia out of the box, and Ubuntu Studio is not it. Not unless you want to DIY overhaul the whole system and maintain it forever.

You need Bazzite, probably. Or CachyOS.

You could fix Ubuntu temporarily, eventually, but it will always be like a boat once you start configuring stuff yourself. But use a gaming distro, and gaming fixes and setups come down the pipe for you.

TBH I have made this mistake more than once. Now I run don’t a distro that focuses on this and have never looked back.

I had a lot of problems with mint. Difficult fir a new user like me. Had to reinstall once i noticed i did not set a su/sudo password so could not do anything :(

Perhaps a more minimalist setup? There was a post recently about one that uses zero RAM and zero CPU. That might not suit your use case though.

I had used linux mint as my default OS for years, which is said to be the "easiest distro". Still there was a ton of maintenance. Every week one thing or the other didn't work properly.

Even a debian server I own, which is completely barebones, without even a graphic interface. Last week I had to manually fix the sources file because trixie update messed it up. A couple of months ago I have a very bad issue with the root partition filling up of old kernel images because I didn't run autoremove frequen enough.

So you are not alone. It does feel like owning a boat.

It’s the same on windows Android iOS.. Stuff happens the beauty of Linux is your always learning.. it will help if you want to get a devops job.. will help you with stability.. will help you brag to your friends.. you will learn more about your computer what’s good bad whatever.. takes time. almost everyone was born using windows.. it’s a learning process..

In the end it will all come together and make sense.. choose a distro you like and stick with it

Each Distro is effectively a different OS, so depending on what you run you will have a different experience.

I started out on OpenSUSE because a CAD software for work only was supported on RedHat or SUSE. NVidia hosts a repo specifically for OpenSUSE so I added that and it figured out the driver. So all those nVidia complaints I read about just never happened for me. No tearing or flickering.

My wife's old laptop couldn't run W10 so we put Linux on it. Every Debian based distro I tried would crash on install, or hardware error during boot. But Fedora or OpenSUSE worked fine (warned of error but worked around it). Eventually moved her machine to NixOS, and its been stable for years.

Just because a distro gives you pain, dont give up if you still enjoy the idea of Linux, there are so many distros that one will work better for your needs

In general, yes.. I used Ubuntu years ago but for almost 10 years now it's MX Linux (Debian based), only problem I had was on my brand new PC the wifi card was new and not well supported by the kernel, but with new kernel/driver it improved and now I have 0 problem.

Windows just worked.

Excuse me while I laugh hysterically while remembering the sorts of Windows issues I've troubleshot for family or coworkers. The one where the combination of a particular Windows version + a particular MS Office version + document previews being activated would cause Office to crash randomly on operations that had nothing to do with document previews was particularly memorable and difficult to figure out. The various Linux snafus I've had to deal with were pretty easy to handle by comparison.

I experience the same thing every time I decide to try KDE on any distro.

For me yes, I have a laptop with Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU with hybrid graphics and both can change depending on what I'm doing (on Wayland BTW)

I do but im not gaming on my linux setup and im using zorin although I just installed kde. Installed a few other things as I have needed them but for my day to day it was pretty good right out of the box (ok there is no box anymore but I don't know of a new phrase for this). If I was gaming I would likely do a separate gaming distro.

I got Ubuntu. It gives me weird warning messages on boot. Sometimes they're red. I just ignore them.